With recent credible allegations of sexual abuse against many speedrunners, I think it's important to give the proper tools to moderators of speedrunning communities to properly address the issue in an easy manner.
I, for one, believe that all the times of abusive speedrunners should be removed; however, there is not even close to universal agreement on this. Many people cite that leaderboards are meant to keep track of the history of a speed game, and thus times of abusers should not be removed, in order to preserve that history. Even if many do agree that these people's times should be removed, many also disagree, and it can be hard for moderators to make committal decisions regarding this issue.
A tool that the website could incorporate that would greatly reduce this issue would be a tool to anonymize a submitted run to the public. This would allow moderators to hide the proof video, site account and social media links of a submitted run, to all except moderators of the game. Moderators could then also reverse this change if new evidence comes to light.
This solution would address most of the concerns of both sides and would allow communities to make stances on these issues without as much commitment or dispute.
Is this a functionality that speedrun.com could add in the near future?
If I understand how it works correctly, this is possible via a moderator editing an existing run (click the run on the leaderboards, then click the three dots on the right), and setting the runner name to something that does not identify the runner (like "Anonymous runner" or "Name removed" or something), since I'm pretty sure that does not have to correspond to an actual user on the site. It's a bit more time-consuming than a one-click "remove runner name" option, but it's there and fulfills the purpose if you're dead set against removing the run.
The only thing I'd be careful with is that 1) you wouldn't want to pick a name that actually has a user account on SRC, and 2) if the game/runner is high-profile enough, someone may try to retroactively register an account with the username you choose.
This is sort of already possible. If you edit a run and change the 'Player' field to something that isn't the username of somebody on the site (for example "[Anonymous]" with the square brackets), this will disassociate the run from the user and turn it into a "guest" run. You'll have to remove the video link, run comment, etc manually and keep track of all that information on your own if you wish to be able to reinstate them, however (you could find the video link and run comment in the audit log, but there's no real way to search the audit log for specific things at the moment).
As for the possibility of making this a proper feature, I think having hidden run information would create a lot of technical problems with how the site currently works, and thinking outside of this specific use case I'm not sure that making it easier to suppress users' runs in this way is a fantastic idea.
[quote=Derek_MK]someone may try to retroactively register an account with the username you choose[/quote]
This is not possible. The moderator would have to re-edit the run for it to link to a new account.
Derek, what you've said is true but this can only be done for one user per game (unless you start assigning people as Anonymous Runner A/B/C and stuff like that, which could get pretty dumb pretty quickly).
And to both of you: This also wouldn't be easily reversible; if the decision was made to reverse this in the future, people would have to keep track of who's who, potentially far into the future. A designated tool to do this would be much more useful.
Apologies for not quote replying, I'm not really sure how to do it.
[quote]
Apologies for not quote replying, I'm not really sure how to do it.[/quote]
It's just [ quote ] and [ /quote ] unless this post makes me look like a giant goofball.
Frankly, I personally think it should be difficult and annoying to do or undo something like this. Removing somebody from a leaderboard, for any reason, is not something that should be done lightly. And if there was very good cause for doing it in the first place, reversing that decision should also not be done lightly. But putting that aside and looking at the feature itself, I don't see this happening because of the aforementioned technical concerns, and also because it would imply the site encourages and endorses this as a solution (so far the site's stance on this has been completely neutral), since this is pretty much the only possible use-case I can think of for anything like this.
I think a far more reasonable thing for the site to do here would be to improve the audit log. Specifically, being able to search it for events related to specific runs or users (or better yet, just being able to look at an audit log in the context of a single run) would allow you to keep track of which runs were previously tied to which users and the information that you would want to re-attach to it relatively easily, while also being tremendously useful in a variety of other circumstances (honestly, it's needed a bit of an overhaul for quite a while now anyway).
I do agree that improving the audit log would also be a great solution, ShikenNuggets, although I'm not sure what technical concerns there would be with my initial proposed solution. It's essentially just a matter of setting a flag to not show certain info on certain runs; I doubt that it would be a massive struggle to implement it. It doesn't have to be perfect, and it's fine if someone is able to dive into the source code and find the information; I am just proposing to make this information not visible to those who aren't looking for it. I also do agree that the action should not be one that's taken lightly, and I don't know how that would be addressed. Again, I'm in favor of removing the runs of offenders entirely, and this was simply a compromise that I saw others think of and I altered slightly. I'd rather see the runs of the offending parties anonymized than for nothing to happen to them at all.
I don't know if I'd agree with your assessment that the site's response has been completely neutral, though, since inaction is almost never truly neutral. But, that's a whole other topic.
[quote=sunflower]I'm not sure what technical concerns there would be with my initial proposed solution[/quote]
Granted I only have a passing understanding of the internal workings of the site, but it's just totally not set up to conditionally hide specific run info in this way. Hiding it on the game's leaderboard would involve modifying core functionality, but then you also have to apply this correctly to the run page itself, user profiles, the front page, and anywhere else where runs might appear. Then there's the API, wouldn't do if this person's username were to, for example, show up in LiveSplit as the world record holder.
To be clear, it certainly can be done, but when it comes to changing core functionality, cost and benefit have to be weighed very carefully. My gut reaction is that this isn't worth the added complexity, especially since we've already come up with a reasonable alternative.
[quote=sunflower]it's fine if someone is able to dive into the source code and find the information... I am just proposing to make this information not visible to those who aren't looking for it[/quote]
I don't think this would be a problem, but if it was, this would totally defeat the point for me. The information is either there or it's not. You're not really cutting ties with somebody if it's "hidden" but actually you can still find everything over here in case you're wondering.
[quote=sunflower]I don't know if I'd agree with your assessment that the site's response has been completely neutral, though, since inaction is almost never truly neutral[/quote]
Uh... okay? Not entirely sure what this means, but my point is just that the site's policy on this is to not have a policy.
[quote=ShikenNuggets]This is sort of already possible. If you edit a run and change the 'Player' field to something that isn't the username of somebody on the site (for example "[Anonymous]" with the square brackets), this will disassociate the run from the user and turn it into a "guest" run. You'll have to remove the video link, run comment, etc manually and keep track of all that information on your own if you wish to be able to reinstate them, however (you could find the video link and run comment in the audit log, but there's no real way to search the audit log for specific things at the moment).
As for the possibility of making this a proper feature, I think having hidden run information would create a lot of technical problems with how the site currently works, and thinking outside of this specific use case I'm not sure that making it easier to suppress users' runs in this way is a fantastic idea.[/quote]
you can also do something like they did on https://www.speedrun.com/mhf2#Any and put flags in so it doesn't look out of place!
Quick update: setting the runner to "Anonymous" will no longer try to tie it to the user @Anonymous.
And yes as the above comment pointed out, you can set the runner to "[us]Anonymous" to give it a flag. The SM64 leaderboard does this for runners without accounts, eg "[jp]Akira".
Is there a list of flag codes anywhere that I can see it? I'd be interested in taking a look at that and having access to it for future reference. [us] and [jp] seem obvious enough but there might be others which could be a bit more tricky. like Sweden vs. Switzerland which could both end up being [sw].
The site uses ISO 3166-1 for country codes. One we added not on that list is Kosovo (xk).
So there's no possiblility to select England (or Scotland for that matter)? The UK flag is [gb] but [gb-eng] doesn't work. I just ended up using the Union Jack for people from the UK.
Yeah there's currently no way to select one of the special priority regions, so for now it'll have to be the top-level country.
EDIT: Now you can. See below:
[gb/eng] = [flag:gb/eng] England, UK [gb/wls] = [flag:gb/wls] Wales, UK [gb/sct] = [flag:gb/sct] Scotland, UK [gb/nir] = [flag:gb/nir] Northern Ireland, UK [es/ct] = [flag:es/ct] Catalonia, Spain [es/pv] = [flag:es/pv] Basque Country, Spain [es/cn] = [flag:es/cn] Canary Islands, Spain [ca/qc] = [flag:ca/qc] Quebec, Canada
These are for runner name entry only, and it will not accept a region that doesn't have special priority, meaning if you try to enter [us/ny] it will default to [flag:us].
Also, you can also now make a flag appear in forum posts (and private messages, guides etc) like this: [flag:fr] = [flag:fr] Unlike for runner name entry, it will accept any region. So you can also do this: [flag:us/az] = [flag:us/az]
I like the idea, @sunflower. I'm also in agreement with @ShikenNuggets about a better audit log. Please put clearer and more detailed info in the audit log and make it exportable. Then we can start to cook with oil and allow mods more accessible leaderboard information at a quicker speed. Searchability would be nice, but it would take longer to implement than exporting the JSON.
